


all the stories are true

by writing_addict



Series: a whole sky of different stars: fma au collection [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga, The Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Shadowhunter Chronicles Fusion, BAMF Magnus Bane, BAMF Tessa Gray, Background Tessa Gray/Will Herondale, CAUSE OH BOY HERE IT IS, F/M, Gen, Herondales - Freeform, Hurt Edward Elric, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Pre-Canon, Sorry Will, The Accords (Shadowhunter Chronicles), The Author Regrets Everything, The Author Regrets Nothing, The Clave (Shadowhunter Chronicles), This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, alchemy AND the nephilim? in the same world? disastrous, and a SHADOWHUNTER because there is so little that i know of her canon backstory, at least briefly - Freeform, but he's dead so like, ed swears off alchemy after the human transmutation, hand-wavy timeline, he's there for literally two paragraphs but he stole the show anyway, in which i mash up two worlds that have nothing to do with each other, remember that time when i wrote 6500+ words of tessa gray and edward elric interacting, so im making it up as i go, trisha elric was a herondale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-25
Packaged: 2019-12-07 04:12:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18229739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writing_addict/pseuds/writing_addict
Summary: “What am I?”Her lips quirked up in the faintest of smiles, her hand falling to her side again. “You’re your mother’s son, of course.”Ed found himself holding his breath, knowing,somehow,that the words she was about to say could change everything.Wouldchange everything.Tessa Gray took his hand in hers, somehow regal, noble despite sitting on an invalid’s bed in a loose sweater and cotton pants, and her voice was golden with reverence as she whispered, “You and your brother, Edward, areNephilim.”Trisha Elric had more secrets--and more family--than anyone knew. Add into the mix her traumatized, sort-of orphaned children who've sworn off alchemy, an ancestor who won't stand to see her descendants lost to despair, and a warlock who knows just how to aggravate and motivate at the same time, and...well, you've got a recipe for something. Whether it's for something truly great or something truly disastrous remains to be seen.





	all the stories are true

**Author's Note:**

> im completely ignoring the fact that will herondale would feasibly be alive and well at 50 years old and that technically in nineteen-fucking-eleven there would only be two generations of Will and Tessa's branch of the herondale family. timeline who? not in this house. also, magnus bane is here because he demanded to be.
> 
>  
> 
> _"There's plenty of sense in nonsense, if you’re willing to look for it." - William Herondale_

_April 4th, 1910 - The Rockbell House, Resembool, Amestris_

They failed.

_They failed._

Those two awful, damning words chased themselves through Ed’s head over and over and over, a cacophony of voices whispering them to him as he stared blankly at the ceiling, seeing nothing. Seeing _everything._ Seeing white teeth in a white face, a macabre imitation of a smile stretched wide and mocking as he screamed and clawed at that blank, white place, watching his arm fade away along with—with his _brother._ His little brother, the last of his family, the only thing that _mattered_ in this dark, damned world.

He would have given anything, everything to have him back. Even if it was just a piece of him, a flicker of the warm smile, the gentle voice, the guiding North Star to his out-of-control wildfire. He’d sacrifice _anything._

And he had. He’d doomed his little brother to a life as an unfeeling metal coffin, and stolen away his own mobility. And with them…with them had gone something else.

Before the blood seal, before _that night,_ before his brother had turned to dust and slipped through his fingers and a monster that called itself Truth had thrown back its head and laughed at him, he’d _burned._ He’d _felt_ alive, even when he’d struggled to breathe, when everything hurt, when grief and hope both crushed his chest. There’d been a spark, a flame, a strange high that came with the blue light of alchemy and the knowledge that _this was something he knew._ This was something he could do, and be _good_ at, that would bring them _success._

That would bring their mother back.

_It didn’t. It ruined everything._

It was his fault, for pushing the limits, for challenging death. For ripping their peaceful lives to shreds with ozone and chalk and circles within circles within circles. He’d done this to himself—and, most importantly, to _Al._

If it had just been him, he wouldn’t be lying here helpless, hopeless in the house of his childhood friend, completely at the mercy of her grandmother, listening to those two damning words bounce around his skull and counting ceiling cracks. If it had just been him, he would still be standing, clawing his way through life in defiance of that _bastard_ Truth. People lived without limbs, without organs, without all sorts of things. Surely he would have, too—carried on, pursued that cursed science and steadily torn himself to pieces for the sake of doing something he was good at.

But people didn’t live without their _bodies._ How could he carry on, pick up the chalk to draw more circles and circles and circles, send that blue light flaring up again and again, _knowing_ what it had taken from his brother? What _he’d_ taken from Al? It would be an—an _insult,_ a mockery of their pain to do it again.

Ed stared blankly up at the ceiling, counting cracks and letting his lips form the words over and over and over. _I failed. I failed. I failed. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry._

_I failed you. I’m sorry, Al._

It was all he could do, lying two limbs lighter than he’d been a week ago, his brother standing guard, a suit of armor with a soul to protect the failure of a big brother who’d given his up. Who’d _given up._

_They should let me rot._

Because what else could he do, really? His obsession, his _need,_ his use of alchemy (just like your father just like your father _just like that bastard of a man you’re JUST LIKE—)_ had destroyed their lives, torn it all to shreds. The thought of touching the subject, looking through those notes again is nauseating, _terrifying,_ if he’s being honest. His remaining hand shook as circles wound through his mind, symbols and quantities and equations full of lies crowding his thoughts until the pain came screaming back in and scattered his attempts at conscious thought.

A quiet sob—he _had_ to be quiet, has to or Al would hear and come rushing in, protective and kind and gentle and all sorts of things he _didn’t fucking deserve_ —tore from his throat, and he curled in the too-soft sheets, hid his face in a pillow that wasn’t his, and let the tears (disgusting, self-pitying, _selfish_ tears) come bit by bit, sliding down his cheeks and staining the pillowcase. _I’m sorry, Al. I’m sorry, Winry. I’m sorry, Granny._

Another sob came, another and another and another, until he was weeping quietly, pathetically into the borrowed pillow as that final, damning realization of just _who’d_ he’d let down by breaking that taboo hit him. He could feel himself shaking with the force of his cries, could only _pray_ that Al didn’t hear and come rushing in, that the scars where his arm and leg should be didn’t flare up and turn sobs into even _more_ pathetic screams.

But if the pain become worse…well, he’d deserve every second of it.

_…I’m sorry, Mom._

“You’ve nothing to apologize for.”

Ed froze at the voice, the sob that had been welling up in his throat freezing there painfully as a gentle hand rubbed steady, soothing circles on his back. A hand that was too small, too _delicate_ to be Al’s, but too big—too _strong_ , steady and graceful and strangely ancient—to be Winry’s or Granny’s. A hand that belonged to a voice that belonged to a _stranger,_ their words laced with an accent he couldn’t place, lilting and melodic and warm. Definitely not the voice of someone who lived in Risembool—maybe not even an _Amestrian_.

A stranger.

A stranger that was _in Winry’s house._

For a moment, he forgot the missing arm, the missing leg, forgot everything except for the fact that _someone was in his best friend’s house_ and they could _hurt her,_ steal from her and Granny and hurt _Al_ on top of it. He forgot the pain humming under the numbing blanket of as many painkillers as Granny could safely give him, forgot everything except fear and a sudden, wild protectiveness—and shoved wildly at the arm, rolling over with a gasp and opening his mouth to _scream—_

“I _told_ you this would happen, Tessa,” drawled a man’s voice, and Ed’s warning shriek died in his throat as he caught sight of a pair of eyes glinting in the darkness. Strange eyes, _inhuman_ eyes, green-gold with pupils like narrow slits that _glowed in the dark,_ the online thing he could see clearly beyond the silhouette of a lanky man leaning against the windowsill. Distantly, Ed recalled his mother’s whispered stories about faeries and gods coming to spirit children away, and a thrill of terror ran down his spine. _Don’t you dare start freaking out,_ he chastised himself fiercely, huddling against the pillows and peering warily across the room. _It’s not like those stories are true, anyways. Besides, what would they want_ you _for?_

Then the man _winked,_ cat’s eyes glimmering with a strange, capricious sort of light, and Ed jerked back with a gasp of surprise—a gasp that turned into a pathetic whimper as his back collided with the headboard, pain flaring through the fog of numbness. There was a soft, soothing murmur from the strange woman, her face in shadow from where she was perched on the footboard of the bed. “Really, Magnus, you didn’t have to _scare_ him.” She shifted, and Ed’s gaze flicked wildly between the two of them, two intruders who seemed strangely, _terrifyingly_ calm despite the fact that they were in a room with a kid capable of shrieking loud enough to wake the whole damn house, including Den.

Then again, he wasn’t exactly a threat. Not like this—maybe not _ever._

_Teacher would be so…disappointed._

Honestly, that hurt more than the idea of her anger ever could.

“It was this or magic his voice away—and if I did that, how would we ever hear that deadly Herondale wit?” The man peered at him, that bizarre amusement blending with a clinical sort of thoughtfulness that made goosebumps prickle up and down his skin. “My, he really _does_ look like Will. If Will had long hair, and was painted gold, but—”

“Magnus?” A note of steel entered that warm, lilting voice, and Ed instinctively curled up more tightly against the pillows. Dangerous—these people were _dangerous;_ he could _feel_ it, some strange power writhing under their skin, humming in the air like the calm before a storm. And he _wasn’t_ dangerous anymore (not even slightly), which meant he was all-too vulnerable against whatever they planned to do.

And magic—the man had mentioned _magic—_

 “Yes, my dearest, _darlingest_ Tessa?”

Something flashed in the darkness—a baring of teeth, a glint of iron and silver and smoke. “Shut up.”

There was a low chuckle. “As you wish, old friend.”

Old friend. So they were either—actually friends, or partners in crime, or _something,_ and they were talking about _magic._ Which was—well, _impossible._ Magic didn’t exist, _shouldn’t_ exist, defied all known laws of science. Magic belonged to his mother’s stories about the Fair Folk and the Children of Lilith, the vampires and the werewolves and the strange warriors she said defended people from monsters. Magic—and those things, those _people,_ with their glowing swords and angel blood and warrior pride—couldn’t _exist,_ because people would know and _use it,_ surely. It didn’t make _sense._

But neither did the idea of two strangers, adults, one with glow-in-the-dark eyes and another with an accent that didn’t belong to any country he’d ever heard of, sneaking into a locked room in a locked house to speak to an invalid (because that was what he _was,_ pathetic and useless and stuck in this bed with his little brother stuck in a body not his own just outside. Pathetic and useless and _goddamn motherfucking stupid)._

Unless…

Unless they wanted to know about _It._

 _No eyes no nose no face just whiteonwhiteonwhite and a smile that made him sicksicksick, laughing as he screamed like it was all a gamegamegame._ The echo of the Truth’s mocking cackles filled his ears as images flashed behind his eyes, faint glimpses of a Gate—no, _the_ Gate—and a land with no shadows to speak blinding him. _Our punishment for playing God, for reaching too high, toying with life and death, tolltolltoll—_

“I w-won’t,” he gasped out. “I w-won’t tell you about it, _Iwon’tIwon’tIwon’t—” don’t make me go back there you don’t know what’s_ there _you don’t know_ who’s _there I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so so sorry—_

 “Ed!” That hand, gentle and soothing and _strange_ (but comforting, some traitorous part of him whispered, soft and weak and desperate for whatever scraps of this undeserved _kindness_ that he could get). “We’re not here to ask you about what happened, about your alchemy, your brother, or for anything about what happened to you. We’re—” The hand squeezed his shoulder gently, before an exasperated sigh came from the woman’s mouth. “Hold on a moment, little one.”

Ed didn’t have the strength of mind or body to howl at the indignity of being called _little,_ curling up against the pillows and just _staring._ Staring as his mind sank into that comforting numbness, the familiarity of the guilt and self-loathing stealing away the self-preservation instincts, the will to fight. So what if they hurt him, killed him? So what if they were insane and talked like magic was a real thing? It would be better if he vanished.

_What have you ever done except shatter the peace in their lives to dust?_

There was a wry chuckle from the man, one with absolutely no humor in it. “That expression certainly says _Herondale.”_

 _“Magnus Bane,”_ the woman scolded again.

“What? The self-loathing, the guilt, the conviction that all the evil in the world is on you and you alone—believe me, Tessa, I know it well. Though I’m not entirely sure if it’s just a Herondale thing or a Shadowhunter thing in general.”

 _Herondale? Shadowhunter?_ Ed was about to smother the flickers of curiosity rising at the strange words, only to freeze as _light_ flared from the palm of a moon-pale hand. Not crackles of electric blue, burning and daring people to remake the world with it only to scorch their hands and laugh when they failed, but a solid sphere of shimmering, white-gold light _levitating_ above the woman’s hand, like a tiny star.

Alchemy couldn’t do that. _Nothing_ he knew of could do something like—like _that._ It was impossible. And so was the idea of humans having the eyes of cats or the ability to sneak into locked rooms guarded by a sleepless metal giant ( _your fault, your fault, your fault)_ without waking anyone or unlocking a single entryway in the process. It simply couldn’t be _done._

And yet in his room sat a man with the glowing eyes of a cat and a woman with the stars in her hands.

A woman with soft waves of brown hair, with a pale, kindly face, tall and proud with muscle hidden beneath smooth skin. A woman who looked like— _who looked just like—_

_“M-mom?”_

Her eyes softened with sorrow and sympathy, the woman’s dark hair shifting as she shook her head. “I’m sorry, darling.” The hand that wasn’t cupping starlight gently smoothed itself over his cheek, stroking her thumb along his cheekbone with a strange tenderness. As though she knew him—or at least _cared_ about him, even if she didn’t know what he’d done, what he _created._ “I knew Trisha H—pardon, _Elric,_ but I’m not her.”

Which—which made sense, really, given that she was dead and buried and Ed _knew that full well_ because he’d committed alchemy’s greatest taboo in trying to bring her back. It shouldn’t have hurt. It didn’t make _sense._

None of this made sense _at all;_ none of it fit within what Teacher had told him and Al of the world, what they’d learned of alchemy, what he’d seen with his own eyes and done with his own hands. People couldn’t make light from their hands or (presumably) teleport into locked rooms and they sure as hell couldn’t talk at ordinary volumes in a dead-quiet house without anyone hearing them. But they were and this woman who looked almost-but-not-quite like Trisha Elric was smiling so _sadly_ at him that Ed almost caught himself bursting into exhausted, overwhelmed tears all over again.

Instead, he lifted his head enough to meet her eyes and rasped, _“W-who?”_

 _Who are you, why are you here,_ what _are you and why are you calling me “Herondale” and why do you look like my_ mom, _I don’t_ understand—

The woman chuckled, the noise soft and sweet and almost lyrical. Her eyes twinkled—not brown, Ed realized, not the glimmering amber of his mother’s irises, but a shade hovering between blue and gray and glowing as if lit from within. Like fog and winter and smoke had somehow been bottled and turned into a color. “Tessa,” she said, and Ed felt strangely as though he was being entrusted with some incredible secret. “Tessa Gray.”

“Or Theresa, if you’re being particularly specific, but she tends to Portal anyone who calls her that to Peru,” the man drawled. “Which is lovely this time of year, unless you happen to be banned for the rest of your immortal life _from_ said country, in which case it’s absolutely _dreadful.”_

“Ignore him,” the woman— _Tessa, Tessa Gray, why do I feel like I should_ know _that name—_ muttered to him conspiratorially, though she seemed more fond than _irritated._ “He’s still a bit sulky about the High Council of Peruvian Warlocks banning him from it.”

“You would be too if you’d ever _been_ there!”

Ed couldn’t respond—couldn’t even _think,_ too confused to really process _anything_ they were saying. Warlocks, Peru, Portals that sounded like they started with a capital “P”, it was all strange and impossible and _unknown_ and he hadn’t heard of two out of the three and _none of this made any sense._ First a woman that looked like his mom popped into his friend’s house, along with a man with cat’s eyes, and then she used some kind of—was it _alchemy?_ It couldn’t be; no science allowed a person to _hold light_ like she was doing.

Unless it wasn’t science. Unless—

No, it couldn’t be. There was no way. It was _impossible._

 _Then again, I thought my transmutation failing was impossible, and…well, look where that got me._ “What,” he managed to force out, his voice shaking and shamefully small (it had been ages, he realized suddenly, since he’d had the _energy_ to be really irritated about anything, much less _himself),_ “i-is—is _that?”_ He tried to lift his hand to point at the light glowing in her palm—tried and _failed,_ because it didn’t exist anymore (and it was _all his fault)._ He swallowed thickly, tears rising all over again, and fixed his gaze on the light in her hand.

Tessa’s playful smile faltered, turned steady and serious and a little bit sad. “This,” she began, and shifted her hand ever-so-slightly, the light forming into a little sphere and hovering between them as she drew her hand away, “is a piece of what we’ve come to talk to you about, Ed. A piece of our world.” Her eyes flashed, as sharp as steel and every bit as strong. “Your _mother’s_ world.”

His—

His _mother?_

“But Mom couldn’t—she didn’t—” She’d never done whatever that hovering-light trick thing was, or anything _close_ to it. Trisha Elric was—he hated that, hated saying _was,_ hated using the past tense for someone who deserved hundreds, thousands more years, using it for his _mom—_ extraordinarily kind, extraordinarily brave and bold and wonderful, but she’d never…never had any supernatural _anything,_ hadn’t even dabbled in alchemy. Which made her so much stronger than Ed would ever be, than that _bastard_ of a man out wandering the world, unaware that the woman he’d left behind was even _dead,_ because she was completely ordinary by the standards of the world and yet stronger than every single one of them.

“She couldn’t do that,” he settled on finally, wondering why he was handling this so _calmly._ Or sort-of calmly. Mostly calmly? Maybe he was in shock; was this how people’s thought processes went when they were in shock? He’d probably been in shock before, but he couldn’t remember. Didn’t particularly _want_ to, either, if this was shock. It _sucked._

“Of course not.” The man—Magnus?—sounded miffed at the very idea. “Trisha Elric was many things, but a _warlock—”_

_“Magnus.”_

Tessa’s eyes were sharp, her voice flat, and Ed couldn’t help flinching away from it, from the difference between her voice now and the soft, lilting, almost _loving_ tone of just a few moments ago. But it wasn’t—no, it wasn’t _anger_ in her eyes. It was sadness, _grief,_ and a weirdly _familiar_ desperation. All-consuming and laced with the kind of pain that never really healed, like…like she’d lost someone too, and knew the hole it punched in your chest, the emptiness nothing could quite erase.

This—whatever _this_ was, whatever reason they’d come to the middle of nowhere far, whatever reason they’d found him for—mattered to her. Meant _everything_ to her. It was something Tessa Gray was clinging to like he and Al had clung to human transmutation, but something…different. She’d said it wasn’t human transmutation that she was looking for, or anything from That Night, but she was coming to him _anyway._

And the way she’d looked at him—tender, and _kind,_ and as loving and gentle as _Mom_ had been—he wasn’t just some research tool.

So she was here _for_ him, for some reason, and talking about Portals and Peru and holding starlight between her fingers like it was nothing. And talking about Mom. About _her world,_ whatever that meant.

He watched as the humor in the man’s catlike eyes faded to a sorrow just as deep, a sympathy that ran even deeper. “Of course, Tessa.” Blue sparks—too bright, too _wild_ and _different_ to be the crackles of a transmutation circle—shimmered as he moved a hand (covered, Ed noticed absently, mesmerized momentarily by the shimmer of brilliant, multicolored lights in the reflection of the lightshow) elegantly. Ed stared as strange symbols illuminated themselves along the wall in an arc, glimmering that unearthly blue, and a—

A _door_ opened. A door or an opening or something, but one second there was a patch of yellow-painted wall and the next there was a swirling void, endless and black like the night had spun open into Winry’s walls. The man rose to his feet, inhumanly graceful. He was taller than he’d looked by the window, hair spiked and glittering bizarrely, a dramatic black coat swirling around him as he stepped in front of the void.

The darkness changed, shifted, and Ed’s eyes widened as a city rose crystal-clear within the confines of the circle of symbols, a city with wide, gray rivers and buildings taller than anything he’d ever seen, the sky the same blue-gray as Tessa Gray’s eyes.  A door to a city in the confines of a room—was _this_ what he’d meant by a Portal? Was this— _magic?_

He turned to Ed, those inhuman green-gold eyes burning as he stood there, gilded blue by the shimmering symbols. He wasn’t smirking, wasn’t laughing—was just watching, staring, considering. As though Ed was some kind of new development, like unformed clay waiting to be turned into…something.

“Be part of the story, Edward Herondale,” Magnus Bane said, and stepped through the Portal.

_Part of the story._

And then he was gone—the blue light flashing behind him, the Portal-thingie vanishing behind him in a flicker of cobalt and electricity, and Ed was alone with a woman who held his remaining hand with one of hers, and pure light in the other.

“Magnus has always had a flair for the dramatic,” she sighed, as though it explained everything, explained _literal magic_ being done in his best friend’s house (because no alchemy he knew of could do _that,_ because _nothing_ he knew of could do _anything_ like that with just a flick of the hand, which meant it was something else entirely). Those eyes focused in on him again, that warm strange-city-sky gray softening as they met his stare. “I’m sorry. It’s been so long for me that I tend to… _forget_ how it feels to learn that there’s a world beneath the painted glass of your own.”

Painted glass. Ed felt like he should protest at that, but…it made sense. The world he’d been living in before he’d seen _that thing,_ before Mom had died, before his bastard of a father had turned his back on him, they’d all been layers of pretty, painted glass that shattered and gave way to another layer, another, another, another. _Circles in circles in circles._

He choked on a hysterical laugh. What was one more layer tossed away? “W-what…what _are_ you?”

 _Tell me the truth. Tell me why you can hold light and why your friend can make circles that take people to other worlds, other continents countries cities_ homes, _why you’re talking about my mom and why Al can’t hear us right now and why you keep calling me Herondale. Tell me—tell me,_ please.

Tessa smiled, soft and sad and yet brilliant all at once. “I am a warlock,” she answered. “A warlock and a Shadowhunter both, and yet neither. But I think your real question is what _those_ are.” Her thumb swept over his cheek, and Ed felt tears burn against his eyes—when was the last time someone had done that, offered that gentle, _motherly_ gesture? Before Mom had died? Earlier, when he’d been shooing her away and protesting that he wasn’t a baby anymore? “And what _you_ are.”

_What…_

“What am I?”

 Her lips quirked up in the faintest of smiles, her hand falling to her side again. “You’re your mother’s son, of course.”

Ed found himself holding his breath, knowing, _somehow,_ that the words she was about to say could change everything. _Would_ change everything.

 Tessa Gray took his hand in hers, somehow regal, noble despite sitting on an invalid’s bed in a loose sweater and cotton pants, and her voice was golden with reverence as she whispered, “You and your brother, Edward, are _Nephilim_.”

* * *

 

Tessa, as it turned it, was an incredible storyteller—especially if the story was true. Ed could only sit, mesmerized, as she whispered about the world within their own, the world that theirs was a mere reflection of. A world where demons crawled between the cracks of their universe and _others,_ where creatures of legend—werewolves, vampires, faeries, _warlocks—_ stalked the earth, where angels gave their blood to humans to turn them into superhuman warriors that she called Shadowhunters.

Shadowhunters—or Nephilim. Soldiers in some sort of heavenly army, bowing only to their mandate to protect the world from demons, to keep safe those that Tess called _mundanes_ (who, she told Ed, were in some ways the lucky ones, the people who had no idea about the Shadow World and could rest easy telling themselves that there were no _real_ monsters under the bed) _._ They were proud and powerful, Tessa said, and more human than many of the mundanes she’d met—and sometimes just as monstrous. No ordinary human could match them in combat, in grace, in the way they burned like fire—brilliant and beautiful and brief, their lives shorter and the echoes they left behind lasting longer.

She said it was a dangerous path, but those who took to it would never be anything else. That they were meant to burn and burn _bright,_ beautiful as the Angel who’d given the first of their kind his blood. That love was one of the few things that could pull a born Shadowhunter away from their kind, that when they loved, they loved with all and everything and their hearts could so rarely be given to another.

She told him a story about a Shadowhunter woman who fell in love with a sad-eyed mundane alchemist, and he with her, and how they’d chosen exile from her race rather than being separated forever. She told him that for the girl, the alchemist was the only star in the sky, and that it was him for her or no one at all. She told him that those of them who had met the alchemist had seen the same look in his eyes, that terrifying, all-consuming love that made the woman leave behind a people and a life she loved. She told him that the Shadowhunter had found peace in her life as a mundane, but never forgot her heritage, never _wanted_ to forget, even as her precious children unwittingly chased the footsteps of their father.

The woman had, Tessa said, planned to tell her children who and what she was, had been, what they _could_ be when her eldest reached twelve and a representative of the Nephilim came to ask them what they would become. Planned to tell them everything, because Shadowhunter blood bred true and her children, too, could bear the Marks of the Angel and carry the glowing blades of her people if they so choose.

Those children were the heirs to one of the most honored and _beloved_ names in the Shadow World, and could walk the path of their mother, their ancestors, of Tessa herself once upon a time if they were found and chose to join what she called the “Clave”.

If the children of Trisha Elric, nee Herondale, chose to rejoin the Nephilim.

If _Ed and Al_ chose to be Nephilim.

And the most shocking piece of it all was that Ed _believed_ her. If she’d come to him before this, before seeing _that thing,_ before the thought of circles and alchemic symbols and crackles of transmutations made him feel sick and small and scared, he would’ve thought she was insane—but she came after. After despair, and grief, and loss, and she walked in holding starlight and bickering with a man with cat’s eyes and her heart seemed to break and mend when she told him about the Trisha she knew—Herondale, not Elric, the strongest and yet most loving Shadowhunter instead of the most wonderful human in the world—and he knew she meant it, because that _emotion_ couldn’t be faked.

Besides, it made sense in a way he hadn’t recognized before—made things, bits and pieces he’d seen and dismissed as being impossible into something _real._ Made the thin white scars he’d sometimes seen on his mom’s skin make sense, marks of battle and strange symbols Tessa had called runes left behind from a life he would never learn from her. Made the glint of fangs in the mouths of two beautiful strangers visiting the local tavern (pale and strangely graceful, silent, and only appearing at night) match up with what Tessa told him of the supernatural creatures who roamed the earth. Made the arsenal of weaponry Al had stumbled upon when he was six and Ed was seven suddenly make sense, gleaming, shining steel and strange silvery metals haunting them until they lost interest as only kids could and decided it wasn’t worth knowing about.

The only thing that _didn’t_ make sense was…well, was why Tessa had come to him. Someone who couldn’t walk couldn’t be a Shadowhunter, and he didn’t _deserve_ to be something like that, be a force for good when all he’d done was hurt his brother, his mother, his friend. Besides, he’d have to leave Al, and he couldn’t _do_ that, and they were just _too late._

Maybe if they’d come—if _anyone_ had come—before the transmutation, things would have been fine, and Ed and Al would be part of that incredible world of magic and monsters, a world that the creature with its sickening smile and endless, horrible amusement at the foolishness of humans couldn’t touch.

But they weren’t, and so it didn’t make _sense._

He said as much to Tessa—who _smiled._ “You think this is the end,” she said softly, her hands gentle around his. “I can see it in your eyes, Edward—that despair, that sense of being lost, adrift, your purpose ripped out from underneath you and stained in blood and pain and failure. You’re _giving up.”_ Something went hard as steel in her smile, razor-sharp. “But you are a Herondale. Perhaps not yet in name, but by _blood_ you are a Herondale, and I _will not_ see any descendant of mine give up on a world that is worse off without them in it.”

_Des—did she say descendant?_

He didn’t have much time to think about it as she continued, her voice suddenly hushed. “The Red Scrolls of Magic. The Black Volume of the Dead. The Book of the White.” Her eyes glowed, bright and unearthly as Magnus’s as she listed them off. “Three of the four books of power belong by right in the hands of either warlocks or the Clave. Any one of these could contain a spell to restore your brother’s body, and your own as well. Any of them, if found by you and the spell cast by a warlock the Clave cannot touch, could change _everything._ Your mother’s journals contain far more information about our world than I would ever be able to give you in a night, your friend’s home contains the means for you to walk again. To become strong enough, bold enough to either step into a life of magic and shadows, or to lead the safe, comfortable life ahead of you here and keep moving forward. There is a great honor and nobility in both, but both require you to _reach,_ and struggle, and _keep living_.

“I can’t make your choice for you. I can’t force you into being part of the Shadow World, into giving up a peaceful, mundane existence, into giving up _alchemy._ I can’t ask you to separate yourselves from all that you know and love and trust for the sake of a strange who bursts into your house blabbering nonsense about demons and destruction. But I can, at least, _give_ you the choice.”

Tessa Gray rose to her feet at last, pressing a kiss to his forehead. Ed could only stare as she stepped over to the wall where the Portal had been, a graceful swipe of her fingers through the air reigniting the symbols. That lovely, gray city rose into view again, and her smile was framed in silver light as she turned toward it.

 _“Ave atque vale,”_ she called, and vanished—and with her, the hum of what Ed faintly recognized as _magic_ vanished from the house.

And if someone had been looking into the room, looking at the small boy curled on the bed, armless and legless and oh-so quiet…well, they wouldn’t quite see silence and self-pity. Not anymore. Not after Tessa Gray shook the foundations of the universe and Magnus Bane rattled the stars. Not after he learned what his mother was, _who_ his mother was.

They wouldn’t have seen despair.

They would have seen eyes burning like heavenly fire.

* * *

  _Oct. 3rd, 1911 - East City Institute, Amestris_

Running an Institute, Riza Hawkeye found, was a far lonelier business than she’d ever imagined.

It wasn’t so much the lack of Shadowhunters in East City—though there were irritatingly few for such a large place, and having such a small population had made her fellow Nephilim fiercely independent and frustrating to try and coordinate. Nor was it the large population of Downworlders; hell, most of the ones she had dealings with (even the infuriating High Warlock of East City, who seemed to take everything both entirely too seriously and not seriously enough at all) had become her friends. It _certainly_ wasn’t that she wasn’t up to the task of being a leader of Shadowhunters, as Marcus Penhallow had tried to insinuate the last time she was in Idris.

No, the issue was the Institute _itself._ Oh, people stayed here (mostly the servants who helped her run the place, mundanes with the Sight who had pledged themselves to the Clave) and Shadowhunters came and went (when injured, when in need of help, but never to stay), but in the end it was always Riza training on her own, managing the affairs of the Enclave on her own—just generally _on her own._

There was nothing wrong with being alone, of course. In fact, she often quite enjoyed it, had relished it back at the Academy in Idris, sneaking away in the blips between classes to climb a tree and wait, still and silent and nothing more than shadows, away from the noise and foolishness of her peers. Perhaps it was that penchant for stillness and silence and predatory solitude that had allowed her to graduate at the top of her class, to travel other Institutes before being named the leader of the largest one in her home country.

Perhaps it was that experience of seeing other Institutes, filled with wards of the Clave with nowhere to go, training young Ascendants who couldn’t come to Idris, that made this Institute feel particularly empty. There were no Shadowhunters here without families or some kind of economic prosperity or both, no one who needed to be here.

No way to forge those strange, chaotic, wonderful little families she’d gotten a brief glimpse of before being stationed in the emptiness of her own Institute.

So yes, it was lonely, and it was quiet, and while Riza never minded loneliness or quiet much, the place that was supposed to be a home to Shadowhunters with nowhere else to go had begun to feel like more of a prison than a home.

And if there was one thing Riza couldn’t _stand,_ it was being caged.

She had a duty, though, to Clave and Covenant, and just the right amount of spite to want to prove people like Marcus Penhallow wrong, and just the right amount of selflessness to know that the Consul and Clave could just as easily appoint someone who wasn’t nearly as friendly to Downworlders or a supporter of the Downworld Accords. So she stayed, even on dreary, awful nights like tonight, when the city seemed gray and it wasn’t quite raining and the whole place felt rather like the setting of some penny dreadful.

_At least a suspicious haunting would be more interesting than the silence._

There was a knock at the door to her study, and Riza raised her eyebrows. _Speak of the devil._ “Yes?”

Rosa Mirelle poked her head in, wide amber eyes blinking out from under an unruly mop of dark curls (Riza had long since given up on helping her pin them back so they didn’t get in the way while she tended to the house). “Ma’am, there are two…” She hesitated, and Riza tilted her head, wondering if she could possibly raise her eyebrows further to prompt an answer from her. “Two Shadowhunters here to see you.”

 _Shadowhunters?_ There went it being the leaders of the East City vampire clan, then; she couldn’t help feeling relief at the thought. They were perfectly lovely, as far as vampires went, but trying to schedule any sort of diplomatic meeting with them was like herding cats. At least this way she could put it off ‘til tomorrow. “Did a patrol go badly?” She rose to her feet, furrowing her brow; most of the Shadowhunters in the city kept at least some form of medical aid in their homes, so for them to come here, it had to be particularly serious. “Why did they come to us first?”

Rosa winced, shaking her head. “They’re not…injured, ma’am. But they opened the door and they’re asking to see the Head of the Institute, and well,” her lips quirked into a tiny, rueful grin, “here you are.”

Unmarked Shadowhunters coming to her door this late at night—or ever—probably did not bode well for anyone, but despite her reputation as a sensible person, Riza was far too intrigued (and, she’d admit, bored) to turn them away. “Very well. Thank you for informing me, Rosa.”

Dark curls bobbed in a nod, and the housekeeper withdrew from the study. Riza set down the papers she’d been drafting—a missive to the Spiral Labyrinth regarding the cryptic message the organization of warlocks had sent her (not threatening, but simply… _confusing)_ —and slipped out the door behind her, heading for the front door. Idly, she pondered who it was, what they could possibly want, if not the resources and protective wards of the Institute. Perhaps they needed access to their library (it was rather impressive—nothing like the Great Library in the faraway London Institute, or the magical items stored in the New York Institute, but impressive all the same), or advice concerning some issue? It would certainly make a nice change of pace.

None of that absentminded wondering could have prepared her, however, for the sight awaiting her.

A boy stood on the steps of the Institute, a massive suit of armor with eyes that glowed red as hellfire beside him. His hood was down around his shoulders, hair damp from the persistent drizzle of rain, the gunmetal gray of the armor shimmering in the smoke of the night. Golden eyes peered up at her from beneath bangs of just as bright a gold—and then the boy _smiled._

It was, Riza thought, a terrible and beautiful smile. The smile Lucifer might have given moments before he fell from Heaven, and all-too ancient and sharp and _brilliant_ on a face so young.

“I’m sorry for disrupting your night,” he said, “but we have nowhere else to go.” He glanced up at the armor who _looked_ at him—moved and _looked_ at him (and if Riza had been a mundane, she probably would have gasped in shock or surprise or _fear,_ but she had seen far stranger, far worse in her lifetime) and nodded with an air of fiery determination. The boy’s smile was gentle, then, almost _adoring_ and oh-so very _young,_ before he looked back up at her.

“My name is Edward Herondale, and this is my brother, Alphonse Herondale. We have come to be trained as Shadowhunters.”

_Fin._

**Author's Note:**

> _"There is no great secret. You endure what is unbearable and you bear it. That is all."_   
>  _\- Magnus Bane_


End file.
